Enrolling IS the machine speaking to the mesh, so straight after it the mesh has
always heard from this node — and the step took that as proof an agent was
running and skipped starting one.
The cost is silent and total. Everything after is the control plane being told
things, and nothing it is told reaches a machine with no agent to collect it: the
registry push at step 7 was accepted, the module recorded, and no container ever
created. It surfaced three minutes later as 'the registry is not there at all',
one step from its cause and looking nothing like it.
Both halves are asked now. A process may be wedged and collect nothing, which is
why the mesh is asked at all; and the mesh may have heard once from a machine
running nothing, which is why the machine is asked too.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01LrgweAeERJYBg88c5cKDzF
Steps 6 to 10, which turn a substrate into a mesh that can maintain itself
(novox/hq ADR 0067).
6 enrol a node record, a token, `mesh-host enrol`, and the host agent
running. Proved by the mesh having HEARD from the node, not by a
process existing: a host that cannot reach the broker looks exactly
like a successful install until the first push applies nothing.
7 registry the module that gives this mesh an image store, registered from a
--catalog checkout, assigned and pushed. Its image is upstream and
never built (04-ISSUES/029) — a placeholder digest there is refused.
Verified by asking `/v2/`, because a container that is up is not a
registry that serves.
8 publish the carried image pushed into that registry, which assigns it the
first manifest digest it has ever had. This is the hinge: without
it the mesh works and can never upgrade itself.
9 control the control plane registered as an ordinary module pinned to that
digest, with the substrate's own store connections delivered
through `secret accept` — read out of the bundle that made them,
because the mesh cannot invent a credential that predates it.
10 retire the temporary control plane dropped from the bundle and removed by
the host's ordinary removal pass.
Every step asks before it acts and reports "already done". No step leaves the
machine without a control plane: steps 9 and 10 overlap deliberately, and two
stateless control planes are untidy rather than broken.
mesh-control's `internal/builder`.PublishImage is mirrored rather than imported —
tier 0 depends on nothing that must be installed first — with one correction: the
digest is chosen from RepoDigests by repository instead of taken as element zero,
so an image pushed to two registries cannot silently pin this mesh to the wrong
one.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01LrgweAeERJYBg88c5cKDzF